Will we reach an ultimate level of the path?

Q: Do you give up the idea of making progress on the path? When you say you gave up evaluating where you are in the levels of consciousness, do you still evaluate whether you feel like you are making progress, or do you transcend that also?

Answer by Kim Michaels, July 17, 2015 at a conference in Los Angeles.

Kim: Well, I think this is a matter of stages. There was a point – I think it was back in the late 1990s – where I had to look at myself because I was very, very concerned about not being prideful. I thought that, in order to avoid being prideful, I had to not acknowledge that I had made progress because it could make me prideful that I had made progress. But that’s kind of like a vacuum to be in, right? So I had to look at myself and say: “Okay, for 15 years I have been studying the teachings of the ascended masters. I’ve been giving decrees for many, many hours. I moved to another country. I’ve really applied myself to the path as I understood it. Do I believe the path works? Because if I don’t believe it works, I’m an idiot for continuing to do it. So do I believe that it works?” And I decided: “Yes, I believe it works.” Well then, I also had to accept that, if I have applied myself to the path for that many years, I must have made progress.

So it was kind of a process for me to see that it’s really not prideful to acknowledge that you have made progress, that you have gone to a higher level than you were at 10 or 15 years ago. Because I hadn’t just read a book and thought I’d shifted my consciousness. I’d worked for it for 15 years, worked hard. So it was important for me to acknowledge that: “Yes, I had made progress.” Because that sort of opened me up to saying: “Okay, but then I must also be closer to the point where I’m capable, I’m worthy, of doing something for the ascended masters.”

I think if I hadn’t made that shift, I wouldn’t have been able to do what I’m doing. I wouldn’t have been able to accept that I was worthy to do something for the masters. So I think it’s important for all of us to come to that point, and that is in a sense an evaluation. Since then I’ve gone through other phases, and it just started fading away more and more – I don’t even worry about what level of consciousness I’m at. On the other hand, I haven’t given up the idea of making progress. I think I’ll make progress as long as I’m in embodiment. Really, the only thing that matters is that I take the next step, whenever that comes up, which sometimes happens almost daily. I see something in my psychology: “Oh, I need to transcend that.” Or: “Why am I reacting to that?”

I went through a process just this spring. I grew up in Denmark, and my father was a hunter, and most of the men in my family were duck hunters. We would go out in boats and hunt ducks, and I used to write books and articles about this. So I decided that, since I was back in Denmark, I would take this hunter’s exam. It’s quite an involved process, and I did it partly because I felt that it would bring up the ghosts from the past that I might not have transcended. And there was just an awful lot of stuff that came up.

It consumed me for four months, dealing with this whole thing. Now that I’ve got the right to hunt, I don’t even know if I need to do it anymore. [Laughter] But I needed to go through that process. That was why I moved back to Denmark – because I felt that it was important for me to go back there after so many years and see what was there that I’d just left behind and hadn’t processed yet. That’s why I’m saying I think I’ve made peace with the fact that there will always be something to transcend and that I will be making progress. I just don’t measure it in that linear way anymore. I don’t concern myself about that.